How I find every restaurant
My least favorite part of a trip, reported live from Paris
Thomas here, writing from our hotel room in Paris, still a bit jet-lagged so not quite ready to sleep. We’re over halfway through the first leg of a three-week trip (Paris, then Mallorca, Menorca, and Marbella), and this felt like the right moment to show you the part of trip planning I dread the most.
Finding the restaurants.
I love eating, I love a scene, a vibe, a hotspot before it gets too trendy. Eating and the experience of it, the getting dressed and making an occasion of it is one of the most magical things about traveling. But I do not love the hours it takes to figure out where. A trip can turn on a single dinner, and I’m not willing to walk out of the hotel hungry and wander into whatever’s closest. So I put in the work even though it’s my least favorite job on the whole trip. Here’s exactly how I do it.
One important note before the tips. We would happily eat at every hard-to-get, hip, cool restaurant in a city. But we often travel with our kids, so that’s not always practical. We scatter and mix: a couple of special ones, a few easy but good ones. And I hold every reservation loosely. If a place I want isn’t available, it wasn’t meant to be. (Same rule as my itinerary system, which is where all of this lands once I find it.)
Pull every source, trust the overlap
I never book off one list. I pull as many as I can and watch for the places that show up on more than one.
The concierge. Hotel or house, there’s almost always a concierge list, and it’s a great place to start. I just read it with one question: who is this list for? The guests at a fancy Paris hotel might want a very different dinner than we do. A spot that lands on their list and on three other lists I trust is a spot I book.
Instagram search. It has gotten shockingly good. I search the neighborhood, the city, the vibe, and save what looks right. The trick is what you look at. Skip the restaurant’s own posts and open the tagged photos. The posts are the highlight reel. The tagged photos are the truth. One place kept topping every search for me, gorgeous food on its own feed, but two swipes through the tagged photos and I could see it had become an Instagram set, not a place for people who want to eat.
